A couple of weeks ago, I attended the IT Expo event in Austin, Texas. After many years of being in Los Angeles, the event organizers decided to move the venue to 102 degree heat. It’s a dry heat though so it’s OK, right?

The increased capabilities of mobile networks, the increased capabilities of smartphones, and the increased availability of network based applications go hand in hand as revenue growth and ARPU growth engines. However, it can be argued that of the three, network- based applications are the most important, because if there were no innovative or interesting applications, the networks would be acting simply as on-ramps to the internet. And if the networks were just on-ramps to the internet, then they just act as pipes and you’d quickly get to pure commoditization.

Back in 2002, before blogs, Twitter and Facebook, a key way to get your message across was to write articles. I wrote a monthly article for many years for the famously yellow-colored Internet Telephony Magazine. Things are a little different now – while there is still a yellow-colored Internet Telephony Magazine and there still is an IT Expo, TMC corporation, who runs both of those, now has a very, very large website, runs webinars, and hosts bloggers. So the magazine is one of their properties as opposed to the main key property.

In my last blog, I talked about the effects that convergence may have on the future. This week, I’d like to address the factors that need to be considered when it comes to user experience convergence. First of all, the delivery network needs to be context-aware. For example, what is the type of end-point being used (since you don’t want to send 720P to a CIF device)?

Last week, I wrote about the pro and cons of convergence. But what does the future hold because of convergence? Due to the capability of the converged networks, hosted offerings have morphed into cloud computing offerings and we have seen communication-based cloud computing offerings emerge. Cloud computing is about a $100B business, split between SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, with VoIP/UC accounting for $5B.

Communications convergence has taken many forms, some of which are still going on today. One key convergence from the 1980’s involved the converging of open-systems based computing with telecommunications. The computer-telephony integration (CTI) industry was born, and from that, Dialogic emerged as a key player. The economics of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware in the form of servers and communication boards, with the open-systems, open API approach yielded best-of-breed applications and solutions.

We’ve all had experience with some kind of outbound notification system – maybe a machine calling to inform you that your childen’s school has been closed due to a snowstorm, or some IT triggered alert about your website, or a very sincere recorded voice calling you right at dinnertime during election season. Generally, there are two types of outbound notification systems – the commercial ones such as above, or an emergency notification, which includes crisis alerts. The crisis alerts form a part of the Public Safety segment, which I recently wrote a blog about.

The FCC estimates that 70% of 911 calls are placed by wireless callers. Couple that with the increase in VoIP phone services, and you can quickly see that the majority of 911 calls are no longer coming from wired lines that are associated with specific addresses. Additionally, with the increased capability of wireless networks, whether 3G or 4G, and with the capability of VoIP networks, one can also see that data, images, and video can also potentially be transmitted in a 911 “call” to a PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point).